Gender, Surveillance, and Literature in the Romantic Period
Romantic-era literature offers a key message: surveillance, in all its forms, was experienced distinctly and differently by women than men. Gender, Surveillance, and Literature in the Romantic Period examines how familiar and neglected texts internalise and interrogate the ways in which targeted, asymmetric, and often isolating surveillance made women increasingly and uncomfortably visible in a way that still resonates today.
The book combines the insights of modern surveillance studies with Romantic scholarship. It provides readers with a new context in which to understand Romantic-period texts and looks critically at emerging paradigms of surveillance directed at marginal groups, as well as resistance to such monitoring. Works by writers such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Smith, and Joanna Baillie, as well as Lord Byron and Thomas De Quincey, give a new perspective on the age that produced the Panopticon.
This book is designed to appeal to a wide readership, and is aimed at students and scholars of surveillance, literature, Romanticism, and gender politics, as well as those interested in important strands of womens experience not only for the additional layers they reveal about the Romantic era but also for their relevance to current debates around asymmetries of power within gendered surveillance.
Lucy E. Thompson is a lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University. She works on nineteenth-century literature and the emotional impacts of surveillance in historical and contemporary settings, focused on gender and literary culture.
Routledge Studies in Surveillance
Kirstie Ball, William Webster, Charles Raab, Pete Fusey
Kirstie Ball is Professor in Management at St Andrews University, UK
William Webster is Professor of Public Policy and Management at the University of Stirling, UK
Charles Raab is Professorial Fellow in Politics and International Relations at the University of Edinburgh, UK
Pete Fussey is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at University of Essex, UK
Surveillance is one of the fundamental sociotechnical processes underpinning the administration, governance and management of the modern world. It shapes how the world is experienced and enacted. The much-hyped growth in computing power and data analytics in public and private life, successive scandals concerning privacy breaches, national security and human rights have vastly increased its popularity as a research topic. The centrality of personal data collection to notions of equality, political participation and the emergence of surveillant authoritarian and post-authoritarian capitalisms, among other things, ensure that its popularity will endure within the scholarly community.
A collection of books focusing on surveillance studies, this series aims to help to overcome some of the disciplinary boundaries that surveillance scholars face by providing an informative and diverse range of books, with a variety of outputs that represent the breadth of discussions currently taking place. The series editors are directors of the Centre for Research into Information, Surveillance and Privacy (CRISP). CRISP is an interdisciplinary research centre whose work focuses on the political, legal, economic and social dimensions of the surveillance society.
Gender, Surveillance, and Literature in the Romantic Period
17801830
Lucy E. Thompson
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Surveillance/book-series/RSSURV
Gender, Surveillance, and Literature in the Romantic Period
17801830
Lucy E. Thompson
First published 2022
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2022 Lucy E. Thompson
The right of Lucy E. Thompson to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-0-367-85676-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-19644-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-01428-7 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003014287
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by MPS Limited, Dehradun
For Rene and Joan
Contents
- Introduction: every key hole is an informer: surveillance culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
- The sexual body: slut-shaming and surveillance in Sophia Lees The Chapter of Accidents
- The medically surveilled body: gendered experiences of the paramedical gaze
- Surveillance and the displaced body: Charlotte Smiths What Is She?
- The domiciliary body: archio-surveillance in Joanna Baillies The Alienated Manor and Jane Austens Mansfield Park
- The urban body: women, geosurveillance, and the city
- Conclusion: regimes of hyper-visibility
Acknowledgements
This book started with my doctoral work, which I would not have completed without the research funding I received from Aberystwyth University and their Doctoral Career Development Scholarship. I also owe particular thanks to Richard Marggraf-Turley for his guidance and support, as well as for his meticulous comments as my arguments took shape; our discussions sparked interesting avenues of research, which took the book in new, more thought-provoking directions. Im also grateful to Sarah Wootton and Louise Marshall for their generous feedback on the research in this book. My colleagues in the English and Creative Writing Department at Aberystwyth University have also been hugely encouraging throughout. Many thanks also to Emily Briggs and Lakshita Joshi at Routledge for their support, for which I am very grateful.
Some of the discussion in Chapter 1 was first published in 2017 as Vermeers Curtain: Privacy, Slut-Shaming and Surveillance in A Girl Reading a Letter, Surveillance & Society, 15(2), pp. 326341. Many thanks to the Surveillance Studies Network for their permission to reproduce the material.
More personal thanks go to my family and my friends, who have advised and supported me throughout. They have listened to me talk about this research for the past few years and without them I probably wouldnt have started the book, let alone finished it. Special mention goes to Douglas, my dog, because it seems remiss of me to forget his monumental contributions; in particular, his diligent efforts to lie across my laptop to ensure I took necessary breaks, even when I didnt want to. And to Stanley, my sisters whippet, whose cool indifference to the whole project in his tireless pursuit of food helped keep things in perspective.
